Meet the Ancestors episode 4
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00:00♪♪
00:10♪♪
00:20♪♪
00:30Last summer, the piece of this quiet English garden was shattered...
00:35...by the discovery of a huge grave.
00:40Who lies in it, and why were they buried here?
00:45♪♪
00:57It's an archaeological mystery which has brought me to the Cotswolds, to Malmsbury.
01:01Which in the medieval period used to have some really important inhabitants.
01:05Well I've heard that a local gardener may well have dug one of them up.
01:12It all happened in the shadow of Malmsbury's imposing Abbey.
01:15In the grounds of Abbey House.
01:19It's exuberant gardens are the work of Martin Roberts.
01:22He'd just been doing a spot of planting, when his spade struck something hard.
01:26How come you end up finding a coffin in the garden?
01:29We're digging over a rose bed and we're told to look out for a water pipe.
01:35The garden is in the grounds of the original Abbey, which Henry VIII disbanded in 1539.
01:41At the end, in amongst the bushes, a magnificent medieval stone coffin, at least 600 or 700 years old.
01:48Beautiful isn't it?
01:52In the corner of the hole, a second simpler burial suggests that the coffin could be part of a cemetery.
01:58What was your first reaction when you found it?
02:00Er, shock. A bit of amazement.
02:04I wasn't sure what I'd actually found.
02:09Then I decided, best to clear away with my hands.
02:13Suddenly a row of teeth appear here.
02:16You realised it was occupied.
02:18It's so fine, isn't it? So beautifully made.
02:22Suggests that it's somebody quite important.
02:25Whoever lies under the earth, deep inside the coffin, had certainly qualified for a grand send-off.
02:31But the thing that struck me was its size, over seven foot long.
02:35Even inside, it's six foot four from head to toe.
02:38Cut to fit someone really tall by any standards.
02:41By medieval standards, they must have been a giant.
02:46Excavation will give us more clues about this extraordinary person.
02:53Abbey House and the gardens belong to post-modernist architect Ian Pollard
02:58and his wife Barbara, a former model.
03:02They're not the most orthodox pair, but a giant amongst the roses was, even for them, a little bit surreal.
03:09Having got over the initial shock, this stone coffin seemed unusually large, over seven feet.
03:16And all I could think of, gosh, whoever's in there must be absolutely enormous.
03:20And it was just astounding to think of someone so large.
03:24It's always been, as we understood, the abbot's garden.
03:27So the fact that there's this enormous stone coffin in it seems most peculiar.
03:34And it's now a question mark of who on earth could it be?
03:39I'd like to know too.
03:41But one thing's likely, this person was probably connected with the abbey.
03:45The best place to look for clues is in the abbey church, all that remains of the original buildings.
03:521,300 years ago, the abbey was founded by Benedictine monks
03:56and its history's packed with colourful characters who might well have been given such a grand burial.
04:01There's the first abbot, St Alden, legendary worker of miracles.
04:08He looks like quite a tall man.
04:13Or could it be my hero, Brother Elmer, the monk who thought he could fly
04:18and famously jumped from the abbey's 430-foot spire to prove it?
04:24Stuntman Colin Skeeping today left off the top of the tower at Malmesbury Abbey
04:29to recall the day in the year 1000 when Brother Elmer, a Benedictine monk,
04:33decided to take to the air.
04:36Amazingly, despite not having a safety wire, Elmer flew 200 yards and managed to survive,
04:41but he did break both his legs.
04:50Perhaps the most tantalising possibility of all is Athelstan,
04:53the first Saxon king of all England.
04:56His tomb lies in the far corner of the abbey, but it's empty.
05:00Popular rumour has it that the bones were removed from the abbey
05:03as protection from relic hunters and buried in the abbot's garden.
05:07That garden now belongs to the Pollards.
05:10Could the coffin that Martin discovered really contain the lost bones of King Athelstan?
05:15The problem is that Athelstan died in 939,
05:18and the coffin in the garden next door looks at least 300 years later than that,
05:22so I'm far from convinced that it contains his bones,
05:25but I'm sure there are a lot of people who disagree with me.
05:28Like the press, feverish speculation puts Athelstan as hot favourite to be the coffin's resident,
05:33with a giant monk coming up in second place.
05:42The Pollards decide to share their discovery with the locals.
05:45By now, everyone's an expert, and all before the bones have been uncovered.
05:50When Henry closed the monasteries down around about 1530, what happened then?
05:55Was it King Athelstan, or it might have been St Alden?
05:59Looking at it from a romantic point of view, we just wish it was King Athelstan.
06:03But you never know.
06:05Gosh, hail bop, comet and then this.
06:08I love it.
06:10I love it.
06:12I love it.
06:14I love it.
06:16I love it.
06:19I imagine it's one of the monks from the abbey, surely.
06:22Oh, it's the Saxon bishop or something.
06:25Was it bishop of the abbey, they thought?
06:28Something to do with King Athelstan.
06:30King Athelstan might have been buried around about there,
06:33roughly speaking, within 20 or 30 metres of that spot.
06:36But what evidence there is for that, we don't know.
06:38It must have been very unusual to have somebody so tall in that age.
06:43We really need some expert archaeologists, really.
06:48Well, we've got one,
06:50and the first job for archaeologist John Humble
06:52is to remove the exposed skull for safekeeping.
06:56The whole garden is protected as a scheduled ancient monument,
06:59and because part of it's been disturbed,
07:01English Heritage must now decide what to do.
07:05After Martin the gardener found the coffin,
07:09the decision's been made to excavate the burial that lies within it.
07:13So John, an English Heritage archaeologist, is here at the moment working on it,
07:17and I've come along to give him a hand.
07:19The first stage is to actually create an accurate plan
07:22of everything that's been exposed here,
07:24and I'm just starting to take out the upper levels of soil,
07:28but I think that there's a good six inches to go, maybe,
07:31before we get down to any bones.
07:36All the speculations made me really eager to see the skeleton.
07:39I'm hoping that we'll find the vital evidence we need to identify him, or her.
07:48Well, after a couple of days digging, our first clue.
07:51The bones are emerging as a complete skeleton,
07:54exactly as if a whole body had been laid in the grave.
07:57In other words, not the jumble of bones you'd get
07:59if these were the reburied remains of King Athelstan.
08:02So it looks as if we'll definitely have to rule him out.
08:09A few troublefuls later, and sadly,
08:11there's another character to eliminate from our enquiries.
08:14The skeleton doesn't quite fill the coffin.
08:19I never really expected Athelstan, but I was at least hoping for a giant.
08:23But now we've got the whole skeleton exposed,
08:25his feet don't reach the end of the coffin,
08:27so that idea's out the window as well.
08:29It's clear we're going to have to look a lot harder
08:31to find out who this person really was.
08:36I'm quite sure that the skeleton still has a lot more to tell us,
08:39but not here.
08:41First, it has to be carefully taken apart bone by bone
08:44and bagged and labelled before starting its journey to the lab.
08:49Actually, there is one more thing I can tell you.
08:51There are no signs that the legs have ever been broken,
08:54at least not until John started to lift them.
08:57So I'm afraid another potential candidate has to go.
09:00It can't be Elmer the Amazing Flying Monk, either.
09:11But I'm still convinced that this is someone important,
09:14perhaps one of the senior monks who lived here over 700 years ago.
09:18Maybe even an abbot.
09:27Before the bones can be examined, we need to clean them up.
09:30As the mud washes away, even John and I can tell
09:33that whoever was buried in the coffin had some serious dental problems.
09:38Oh, dear. Look at the state of this side.
09:41Oh, dear. That really is in a bad way.
09:44Look at the root of that one. That's all rotting away as well.
09:47That must have been right deep down in the jaw as well.
09:50Very painful.
09:51One thing that's always struck me is that,
09:53with a mouth full of absolutely rotten teeth like this,
09:55you must have had the most appallingly smelly breath.
09:57Yes.
09:58Well, the last time I saw this...
10:00Well, for a more definitive opinion,
10:02I've brought our mum's remand to the top bone expert at English Heritage,
10:06Dr Simon Mayes.
10:08I think the first question is, is it a male?
10:12Because we always assumed that it had to be a monk
10:15and therefore it must be male. Were we right?
10:17Yes, yes, yes, we were.
10:19We can be fairly sure it's a male from the pelvis.
10:22It's really this notch here that we're looking at.
10:25And the fact that that's fairly narrow
10:28really does indicate that it is a male.
10:30That's quite a relief.
10:32We had everybody saying that this person was enormously tall,
10:35you know, that he was a giant, 6 foot 4.
10:38How tall did he turn out to be in the end?
10:40Well, we can estimate height in skeletons by measuring the leg bones
10:43and plugging those measurements into a fairly well-accepted formula.
10:47And when I did this for this individual,
10:50he turns out to be about 5 foot 10.
10:52Oh, so not a giant then?
10:54Well, he's not exactly a giant by medieval standards,
10:57but he's a few inches, I think, above the medieval average for males.
11:00Right. OK, so still pretty tall.
11:02And what about his age?
11:04Well, the best way of estimating age in adult skeletal remains
11:08is by looking at the wear on the teeth.
11:11They look pretty worn. Well, that's right.
11:13And, in fact, the crowns of these two have been completely worn away.
11:17And that suggests, at least,
11:19that he was about perhaps in his 50s when he died.
11:22That's quite a good age, then. Yeah.
11:24So far, then, we've got a picture of a man
11:28who's about 5 foot 10 tall, late middle age.
11:32What sort of health was he in?
11:34I mean, can you get any indication of that from the bones?
11:37Well, yes. If we look at the teeth again,
11:39you can see there are dental problems here.
11:42Because what's happened here,
11:44the pulp cavity has actually been exposed because of the extreme wear,
11:49and infection has passed into the pulp cavity,
11:53down the root canal here,
11:55and has set up an abscess, actually, in the jaw there.
11:58So dreadful toothache.
12:00What about any other problems?
12:02If we look at some of the metatarsals,
12:04these bones that make up the instep of the foot,
12:07we can see that there's new bone formation actually on there.
12:11It's this sort of growth on the...
12:13Well, that's right. If we compare it to a normal bone from the other foot,
12:16you can see normally these bones have a sort of smooth surface there.
12:19But you've got this new bone formation.
12:21And what's caused that?
12:23Well, it's quite difficult to be certain.
12:25There are a number of possibilities here.
12:27One possibility I initially thought about was leprosy.
12:30As well as destroying the bones of the feet and of the hands,
12:34it can also cause this type of new bone formation.
12:37But when we looked at the skull,
12:39the sort of characteristic signs of leprosy were absent.
12:42So really we're left with some sort of localised infection
12:45that's just affecting the left foot and the lower leg.
12:48But it's very difficult really to say for sure what that might be due to.
12:52So the poor chap who's got dreadful toothache
12:54can probably walk with a limp then?
12:56Yes.
12:57We're getting more of a picture of the person, aren't we?
13:05But are there any signs that he lived a privileged life?
13:08Simon has studied hundreds of skeletons of medieval people
13:11who clearly didn't.
13:13They've given us a vivid picture of how tough life was then.
13:16Many suffered from acute sinusitis.
13:18The killer disease TB was rife.
13:20And osteoporosis was just as common then as it is now.
13:27Many children died shortly after birth.
13:30And those who survived into infancy, ravaged by hunger and disease,
13:34often suffered stunted growth.
13:37These are some X-rays of some femurs from some of the child skeletons.
13:41And a great number of them show these white lines, Harris lines,
13:45going the width of the bone that we can see there.
13:48So they're not just cracks then?
13:50Oh, no, no. Those are lines which formed in the bone in life.
13:55And they form when growth stops for a while and then starts again.
13:59So, in contrast, our medieval monk,
14:01he seems to be a few inches taller than average.
14:04He's not got any signs of tuberculosis or of sinusitis.
14:09I mean, the picture I get is of somebody who's privileged, well-fed,
14:13you know, perhaps even a bit overfed.
14:16I mean, is this going too far?
14:18I think it is, I'm afraid, from just one individual.
14:22I don't think we can really come to those sort of conclusions.
14:25And also I X-rayed his leg bones and found that he too had Harris lines.
14:32This is a crucial clue.
14:34Harris lines on his bones show that his growth stopped five times
14:38between the ages of four to nine,
14:40perhaps due to illness or starvation during the winters.
14:44So if he was a monk, he may not have been from a privileged background
14:47like many of his brothers.
14:49Maybe, if he was from a poor family,
14:51his parents sent him to the abbey at a young age
14:54to give them one less mouth to feed.
15:03The next step in the search for his identity is to find out when he died.
15:07At Oxford's radiocarbon dating laboratory,
15:09a tiny sample taken from one of his bones could give us the answer.
15:20Every living thing contains radioactive carbon,
15:23but at death, the radioactivity steadily starts to fall.
15:27So by measuring how much it's decreased,
15:29you can work out how long ago that living thing died.
15:35But the dating process will only work
15:37if enough pure carbon can be extracted from the bone collagen.
15:40To do this, the ground-up sample will be left to dissolve in acid,
15:44but it'll be several weeks until we get the results.
15:50Before any decision is made about what should be done with the coffin,
15:54we've invited a couple of very different experts along
15:57to tell us more about it.
15:59What I'd like to know, David, is where does the stone come from?
16:02Well, it's one of the finer ulites and somewhere in this region, I think,
16:06but probably not Malmsbury itself.
16:08I think a little distance away.
16:10Obviously carefully selected to be one of the better stones, I would have thought.
16:14Tony, you're the stone mason.
16:16You start off with the block. How do you actually chop it out?
16:19Well, firstly, it will be drawn out with a thing called a drag,
16:23and so a mason would mark the whole caboodle out using that.
16:28Then, using an axe similar to this,
16:32would very carefully chip away from that drag line.
16:37Right. So none of it's sawn, then?
16:40Nope. Not at all.
16:42But this is terribly hard, isn't it?
16:44What about these marks over here?
16:46I mean, they're the same instrument.
16:48Well, there were various types of axe.
16:51I found this axe near a medieval wall.
16:56I actually dug it up,
16:58and it would appear that it's a similar tool
17:03and probably contemporary to this coffin.
17:07I mean, it's a vague possibility that this could work.
17:11It's a vague possibility that this could well have been the tool that did this job.
17:17Was that head recess cut out with the same sort of tool?
17:20Yeah. It's not actually difficult to form those.
17:25And what's also interesting is that whoever did this was right-handed
17:31because, as a right-handed person, it's very easy for me to chop this way.
17:37But, working left-handed, I have to work this way.
17:42See how the axe goes into these recessions here?
17:47So that is completely different to this.
17:50What do you feel about the level of craftsmanship that's gone into making this, David?
17:54Well, obviously, a lot of work's gone into it,
17:56and I would have thought it was destined to be used by somebody rather important.
18:02The medieval man's bones are now spread all round the country.
18:05While his right fibula is being carbon-dated in Oxford,
18:08his skull has travelled across London to University College,
18:11where Dr Robin Richards, an expert in facial reconstruction,
18:14is going to use it to rebuild the face.
18:23The skull is scanned with a laser to produce an accurate three-dimensional image.
18:27The missing bits of bone have been built up with wax
18:30to give the laser something solid to focus on.
18:36Now the contours of the skull have been captured,
18:39we've got the foundation on which we can build his face.
18:42Robin has designed a programme to work out where all the muscles and soft tissues go.
18:49Just wander it around a bit, look at it from different viewpoints.
18:52It's fine, it's fine, it's been well reconstructed.
18:55All I've got to do now is find a suitable prototype face.
18:59We know that he died aged about 50,
19:02so to get a prototype face we need a selection of 50-year-old male faces,
19:06which can be blended to make a very average face,
19:09free from any unusual features.
19:18Now Robin can stretch the face of Mr Average over the computerised skull.
19:26What emerges is our first glimpse of the medieval man
19:29who was buried in the coffin.
19:38Illustrator Jane Brain will take this image
19:41and use it as the basis for a coloured portrait.
19:45This chap, I think, has got an incredibly strong face.
19:49The first thing to point out, I think, is that the nose is actually genuinely broken.
19:54It is genuinely crooked, that's not a problem.
19:57It looks as though his cheeks might be quite hollow.
20:00Can we have a look at the profile?
20:03Yes, goodness, look at this, it's really quite pitted almost.
20:07Yeah, so that again is real.
20:11Not a very prominent chin.
20:14You don't get an idea of the nose being crooked from the profile, do you?
20:18But the picture can only be completed when we know for certain
20:21whether or not he was a monk.
20:24I need to turn the clock back several centuries.
20:31What's left of the abbey is just a fraction of what stood here
20:34before Henry VIII sacked the monasteries nearly 500 years ago.
20:41This is what survives of the abbey today
20:43and our burial seems a long way away from it.
20:46But at the height of its wealth and power, the abbey was over twice this size
20:50and if you add back the missing bits,
20:52then suddenly the position of the burial becomes clear.
20:55It lies right next to the abbey's lady chapel.
21:01This is what the abbey would have looked like.
21:05This is a further clue to the man's identity.
21:08Since he was buried so close to the lady chapel,
21:11he must have been a powerful member of the abbey,
21:14but not an abbot, as then he would have been buried in a monastery.
21:18Not an abbot, as then he would have been buried inside.
21:27Back in Oxford, atoms of carbon from his bones
21:30have been shooting around the accelerator at close to the speed of light
21:33to give Dr Christopher Ramsey a date for us.
21:36And the date has come out to a range of between 1150 and 1300.
21:41Does that make sense?
21:43It fits with what we're expecting, but it's quite a wide range.
21:46Can't you narrow it down any more than that?
21:48Well, I'm afraid we can't in this case,
21:50because it has actually been quite a complicated case for us,
21:53but in a way that you might find quite interesting, actually,
21:56which is that we've done other tests as well as radiocarbon measurement
22:01and it looks as if the diet of the individual involved
22:04had quite a big marine component to it.
22:07In other words, he was eating fish.
22:09But, I mean, that's strange.
22:11Marblesbury's quite a distance from the sea, isn't it?
22:14Yeah, it is surprising and quite unusual, I think.
22:17They were definitely smoking fish in that period.
22:20We know that because there's a fish house, for example,
22:23at Glastonbury where they were smoking fish from the Somerset Levels.
22:26So it's possible that they've been transporting fish.
22:28And it has to be sea fish?
22:30It has to be sea fish, not river fish, yes, from this evidence.
22:33It was well worth the trip to Oxford.
22:36It's a shame the date wasn't a bit more precise,
22:38but I'm amazed at what you can tell about somebody's diet from their bones.
22:43And that evidence about fish, it really points to him being a monk.
22:51Now that the scientific investigation has come to an end,
22:54English Heritage want the coffin to be reburied.
22:57But Ian and Barbara have other ideas.
23:00If there was a way of not disturbing any of the archaeological information
23:05and sort of...
23:07..lifting...
23:09..lifting it out.
23:11Ideally, it would be nice to actually take it out of the ground.
23:14I wouldn't like the coffin to be lifted and exposed,
23:18because in order to do that,
23:21we'd have to do yet more archaeological investigation
23:25in a rather kind of keyhole way.
23:27We have uncovered it for whatever reason it is there.
23:31And I think that the value that it has to all of us
23:36is quite considerable, far more than if it is actually covered over again.
23:40The Pollards would like to put the coffin on permanent display,
23:44but Amanda isn't convinced.
23:46The coffin would, I think, suffer, undoubtedly,
23:49if it was exposed to the elements.
23:52If we get a good stab at finding a way to protect it,
23:55and if you'll go along with that, and if we fail, then we'll...
24:00Failure, what's that?
24:03..then we'll protect it the only other way that we can,
24:06which presumably would be to backfill it.
24:09To backfill. Are you happy with that?
24:11Yes, but let's work on it on a positive basis that we can make it work.
24:15I think that we can, at a pinch, accept that,
24:18but I don't think it's going to work practically.
24:22Jane has now added in the details of our monk's clothing and haircut
24:26to make him a black-habited Benedictine.
24:32To convert this portrait to an animated image,
24:35we've come to the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital.
24:38Gus Alusi is a surgeon who's developed ways of visualising the skull
24:42and the face in three dimensions to help in planning surgery.
24:46Gus, have you managed to put Jane's painting
24:48and Robin's reconstruction together to make a face for us?
24:51Yes, indeed, we have.
24:53We've managed to wrap the artist's impression
24:55around the soft tissue reconstruction.
24:57He looks great, doesn't he? Oh, there's his broken nose.
25:01And it obviously helps once you get the flesh tones back onto it,
25:04doesn't it?
25:05Then, I suppose, for the first time, it really starts to look like a person.
25:09Absolutely.
25:12We've used all the evidence we can find
25:14to create a picture of this man and his life.
25:16Although he ended it as a respected member of a religious community,
25:20perhaps shielded from some of the hardships of everyday medieval life,
25:23his bones tell a story of a childhood
25:25in which starvation and disease may have played a part.
25:28And we can sympathise, too, with his suffering.
25:30After all, toothache in the medieval period was as bad as it is today.
25:34But we can never be quite sure of how he died.
25:39We can, though, be fairly certain that he died in the abbey
25:42and would probably have spent his last days being cared for in its infirmary.
25:48Before his burial in the stone coffin, in a ceremony unchanged for centuries,
25:53his fellow Benedictines would have placed his body in a temporary wooden coffin
25:57and gathered around it for an all-night vigil.
26:18At dawn, he would have been carried to a favoured plot
26:21next to the abbey's lady chapel
26:23and buried wearing only the coarse hair shirt
26:25that he wore underneath his black habit in life.
26:48Ian and Barbara haven't managed to come up with a satisfactory solution
26:52to displaying the coffin in the ground, so it has to be filled in.
26:56As a compromise, Amanda has agreed that if it's carefully covered,
26:59it can be opened up for display in warm weather.
27:08The bones are still in a box in the Ancient Monuments Laboratory,
27:11pending removal to a local museum.
27:18I'm sure this is very different from the ceremony that was carried out here
27:21over 700 years ago.
27:23I think we've all got different feelings about it as well.
27:26You might think that the bones of the monk should have been put back
27:29where they were originally buried.
27:31Or maybe you think that they're better off in a museum where they're safe
27:34and where perhaps in a few years science will tell us more about him.
27:37I feel that I've got to know the person over the last few months
27:40and, to me, this is the place where I say goodbye.
27:47THE END
27:55Famous faces digging into the roots of their family tree
27:58to unravel hidden secrets, lost connections and surprising discoveries,
28:02revealing stories of courage, joy and sacrifice.
28:06Who do you think you are?
28:08Watch the new series and past episodes on BBC iPlayer.